Mike sees the church of JS-first ignoring the lessons to be learned from the years of experience accumulated by CSS practitioners.
As the responsibilities of front-end developers have become more broad, some might consider the conventions outlined here to be not worth following. I’ve seen teams spend weeks planning the right combination of framework, build tools, workflows and patterns only to give zero consideration to the way they architect UI components. It’s often considered the last step in the process and not worthy of the same level of consideration.
It’s important! I’ve seen well-planned project fail or go well over budget because the UI architecture was poorly planned and became un-maintainable as the project grew.
Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.
The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.
The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.
One dev team made the shift from React’s “overwhelming VDOM” to modern DOM APIs. They immediately saw speed and interaction improvements.
Yay! But:
…finding developers who know vanilla JavaScript and not just the frameworks was an “unexpected difficulty.”
Boo!
Also, if you have a similar story to tell about going cold turkey on React, you should share it with Richard:
If you or your company has also transitioned away from React and into a more web-native, HTML-first approach, please tag me on Mastodon or Threads. We’d love to share further case studies of these modern, dare I say post-React, approaches.
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
HTML web components for augmenting date inputs.
Had you heard of these bits of CSS? Me too/neither!
If you’re going to toggle the display of content with CSS, make sure the more complex selector does the hiding, not the showing.
Going back to school in Amsterdam.
The enshittification of React …which was already pretty shitty for users.